In our last blog post Paul went over our collective pre-launch thoughts on Chubbins. We're now coming up on a month since the game hit the eShop, so it seems a good time to talk about how things have gone post-launch. This could be considered a postmortem of sorts; I'll be tackling the project in sections, looking at what we did wrong, what we did right, and other aspects of the project and its reception worth noting.

In less than 24 hours, Chubbins will be launching on Nintendo's Wii U eShop! As developers, the agonizing wait for its success or failure is almost over, so it seems a good time to write up some quick thoughts about this stressful pre-launch window.

Any indie developer starting out needs to be prepared for failure, both mentally and financially. Unfortunately we made the mistake of wasting our "means to fail" with three games on the iOS market, where we didn't fit in. So in heading to Nintendo (where we wish we could have been to begin with), we knew from the start that it was a last chance scenario; we couldn't afford another failure. If our first game on Wii U doesn't work out, that's it. So I think it's safe to say that this period of hopeful anticipation has been more stressful for us than most.

Chubbins for Wii U™ is moving closer to submission to Nintendo! The lastest hurdle, an unexpected revisiting of graphics, is behind us now.

If you haven't been watching our blog in the short time it's been around, we had initially planned on leaving Chubbins' simplistic graphics more or less as they appeared on iOS. That decision was at first met with much disapproval from people around the web, but when we asked for and got more specific feedback as to what we might improve, a number of very supportive people also appeared to help offset all the criticism. Thanks to everyone out there, positive and negative alike, we were able to find a better balance for what we wanted to change.

Chubbins may not be ready for Wii U quite as soon as we'd hoped. Efforts to get the word out about the game have resulted in feedback that has us baffled. Most of said feedback relates to the game's visuals.

When you break it down, Chubbins is about moving left and right from block to block to traverse levels. That's the bare-bones objective. The platforming gets incredibly tricky at times, but at its core it's a very simple game with a very simple goal. So just what should such a game look like? To us it seems a simple game should have simple visual needs, especially when the player's concentration might be thrown off by unecessary distractions.

While Chubbins has been a finished game since spring '13, porting the game to Wii U has given us the opportunity to add some new features and make a number of improvements that make for a generally more solid experience. Read on to see what they are and why we're making them!